forgotten

There are a lot of things in life I’d like to forget. There are all those times when I made a total fool of myself – even today I can think of moments from high school and want to crawl in a hole. There are words spoken in anger, or just ignorance. There are things I did in moments of pressure, far from home and feeling in danger, that I have better answers for now. Satan has a way of dragging those things back through my memory at moments when I start feeling at peace with myself.

That’s why a promise of God that I read this morning in Isaiah 65:17 has such resonance for me: 

“‘See, I will create
new heavens and a new earth.
The former things will not be remembered,
nor will they come to mind.’”

God promises that once this journey on earth is done, when his plan for redemption of his people has run its full course and all of the elect are gathered to him, all of my bad choices will be forgotten. All of the hard trials of life won’t even be a memory. The pain I earned for myself and the pain life used to season and shape me will not even cross my mind, ever again. More importantly, they won’t cross God’s either. It will literally be as if they never happened.

What a blessing! Along with everything else that will be wonderful about heaven, this is wonderful. I am immortal, but my mistakes and the abuses done to me are not.